Talk about a no-brainer. The answer is "c" -- the Nobel Prize! On Tuesday, Japanese particle theorist Toshihide Maskawa, who shared this year's physics prize with two other researchers, told reporters in Kyoto that the Nobel was "a rather mundane thing."

But despite this little tradition of thanklessness among laureates, Maskawa's "mundane" jumped out at me -- and not only because it had the highly annoying effect of making me feel at once schoolmarmish and intellectually feeble, about the worst combination there is. It caught my attention because it seemed sadly emblematic of the way the forces of irony and entitlement have produced a culture of people who often have no idea how to express simple, unqualified gratitude. From Oscar winners who turn their acceptance speeches into political diatribes to ordinary folks who've come to believe that text messages are as good as thank-you notes, it seems that old-fashioned graciousness, like Maskawa's Nobel, is now considered yawningly mundane.